If you read literary magazines in Canada, Colette Maitland is likely a familiar name, as her fiction has appeared widely in many of Canada's most acclaimed publications. Now she has followed up her short story collection Keeping the Peace with a new novel, Riel Street (Frontenac House). Riel Street tells the story of the Bouchard family, living on a military base in Kingston during the late 60s and early 70s.

Writers are given to omens and portents and here’s one: I share the same birthday as Harry Crews.

If I could choose to emulate any one writer, it would be Harry Crews, and that we share the same birthday makes me feel (foolishly no doubt!) that at least astrology is on my side. But as much as I like the stars, I don’t depend on them for my writing skills and instead, I’ve taken the time to study Harry’s works.

His astonishing imagery, his larger-than-life characters, his observations and insights, his visceral sensual prose and his compassion for the most flawed and aberrant of human beings is the yardstick by which I measure my progress as a writer.

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